The response from the mainstream media to Wikileaks revelations of CIA surveillance and hacking - against the backdrop of the MSM and Beltway fuelled brouhaha over fake news, alleged Russian spying and interference in U.S elections, and general animus towards Moscow - is further evidence the Fourth Estate is irretrievably beholden to the amorphous Deep State and the ruling classes du jour. It in turn underscores the MSM's ever present grip on the broader American political psyche. That it was ever thus has been obvious for decades to all but the most deluded afficionados of life, liberty, democracy, privacy, freedom, the rule of law, the pursuit of happiness, and the "American way", whatever that means. With this in mind, it's time to take a deep breath for an even deeper dive into the cess-pool that is the collective press-pool.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. — F Scott Fitzgerald, 1936

So far as I can see, all political thinking for years has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome....To appreciate the danger of Fascism the Left would have had to admit its own shortcomings, which was too painful; so the whole phenomenon was ignored or misinterpreted, with disastrous results. — George Orwell, 1945

The soul of wit may become the body of untruth. However elegant and memorable, brevity can never, in the nature of things, do justice to all the facts of a complex situation. On such a theme one can be brief only by omission and simplification. [This might] help us to understand — but help us, in many cases, to understand the wrong thing; for our comprehension may be only of the abbreviator's neatly formulated notions, not of the vast, ramifying reality from which these notions have been so arbitrarily abstracted. — Aldous Huxley, 1958

We are all, as Huxley says, Great Abbreviators, meaning that none of us has the wit to know the whole truth, the time to tell it if we believed we did, or an audience so gullible as to accept it. — Neil Postman, 1985

'Pseudo-events, dramatic productions orchestrated by publicists, political machines, television, Hollywood, or advertisers.....have the capacity to appear real, even though we know they are staged....[they] can evoke a powerful emotional response of overwhelming reality and replacing it with a fictional narrative that often becomes accepted as truth...The unmasking of a stereotype damages and often destroys its credibility. But pseudo-events are immune to this deflation. The exposure of the elaborate mechanisms behind the pseudo-event only adds to its fascination and its power. This is the basis of the convoluted television reporting on how effectively political campaigns and candidates have been stage-managed. Reporters, especially those on television, no longer ask whether the message is true but rather whether the pseudo-event worked or did not work as political theater. Pseudo-events are judged on how effectively we have been manipulated by illusion. Those events that appear real are relished and lauded. Those that fail to create a believable illusion are deemed failures. Truth is irrelevant...' — Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, 2009.

Two unnamed senior Trump administration officials briefing journalists Tuesday asserted that a Syrian regime airstrike in the city of Khan Sheikhoun on April 4 had deliberately killed dozens of civilians with sarin gas.

The Trump administration officials dismissed the Russian claim that the Syrian airstrike had targeted a munitions warehouse controlled by Islamic extremists as an afterthought to cover up the Syrian government's culpability for the chemical attack. Moreover, the Trump officials claimed that US intelligence had located the site where the Syrian regime had dropped the chemical weapon.

However, two new revelations contradict the Trump administration's line on the April 4 attack. A former US official knowledgeable about the episode told Truthout that the Russians had actually informed their US counterparts in Syria of the Syrian military's plan to strike the warehouse in Khan Sheikhoun 24 hours before the strike.And a leading analyst on military technology, Dr. Theodore Postol of MIT, has concluded that the alleged device for a sarin attack could not have been delivered from the air but only from the ground, meaning that the chemical attack may not have been the result of the Syrian airstrike.

The Trump administration is pushing the accusation that the Assad regime was the force that carried out the highly lethal chemical attack on April 4 very hard, perhaps not so much to justify the already politically popular US strike against the Shayrat airbase on April 6, but rather to buttress a new hardline policy against the Syrian regime.

The two unnamed senior Trump officials who briefed journalists Tuesday sought to discredit the Russian claim that the Syrian airstrike had hit a warehouse in Khan Sheikhoun that was believed to hold weapons including toxic chemicals. One of the two unnamed officials said that a Syrian military source had "told Russian state media on April 4 that regime forces had not carried out any strike in Khan Sheikhoun,which contradicted Russia's claim directly."

This Trump administration official appeared to be suggesting that there was no evidence that a weapons storage site had been hit by a Syrian airstrike. But an internal administration paper on the issue now circulating in Washington, a copy of which Truthout obtained, clearly refers to "a regime airstrike on a terrorist ammunition dump in the eastern suburbs of Khan Sheikhoun."

More importantly, the US military allegedly knew in advance that the strike was coming: Russian military officers informed their American counterparts of the Syrian military's plan to strike the warehouse in Khan Sheikhoun city 24 hours before the planned airstrike, according to the former US official who spoke with Truthout. The official is in direct contact with a US military intelligence officer with access to information about the US-Russian communications. The military intelligence officer reported to his associate that the Russians provided the information about the strike to the Americans through the normal US-Russian Syria deconfliction telephone line, which was established after the Russian intervention in 2015 to prevent any accidental clash between the two powers. The officer said that Russia communicated to the US the fact that the Syrians believed that the warehouse held toxic chemicals.

This report represents the independent investigation on the chemical attack allegedly carried out by the Syrian Air Forces in Khan Sheikhoun, in Syria's Idlib. It provided a pretext for the U.S. Navy cruise missile attack at the Al-Shayrat airbase in Homs.

Introduction

April 7, 2017, between 3.42 a.m. and 3.56 a.m., a massive missile rocket attack was carried out by U.S.S. Ross and U.S.S. Porter from the Mediterranean Sea near Crete Island. The destroyers launched 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles at the Syrian airbase Al-Shayrat in Homs province. According to the U.S. statement that the Syrian Air Forces allegedly used this air base for carrying out an attack on Khan Sheikhoun, has become an official excuse for the aggression, resulting in at least 100 civilians killed and more than 400 injured.

The town of Khan Sheikhoun is located at about 50 kilometers to the South of Idlib province. This territory has been under the control of Jabhat al-Nusra since 2014.

Chronology

April 4, at 8 a.m., Abdullah al-Gani and Muaz al-Shami, freelance journalists who have links with radical groups located in Idlib, provided Orient News and Al-Jazeera with the video footage made by the White Helmets. The graphics show the consequences of the alleged chemical attack in Khan Sheikhoun. According to Muazz al-Shami, sarin gas was used in the attack.

Leading scholar on US-Russia relations addresses the claim being trumpeted by politicians and media on both sides of the political spectrum that Russia is now the "number one" threat to the United States. Given the proxy wars in Syria and Ukraine, Dr. Cohen tells host Abby Martin that the real alarming danger today is "a new, multi-front Cuban missile crisis."

Dr. Stephen Cohen is Professor Emeritus at Princeton University and New York University where he taught Russian Studies. He has been a noted author and commentator on US-Russia policy for decades.

Assad doesn't always gas civilians, but when he does he apparently has Moscow tell the US when and where it is going to happen

Here is a safe assumption to make: If you're to be gas-bombing civilians you won't be telling your information war foes where and when it is going to happen.

However, that is precisely what the US alleges Russia and Syria did.

I. BUZZING FLIES

The West Wing of the White House is a cramped collection of tiny offices, some of them windowless, linked by narrow hallways. New inhabitants are sometimes surprised at just how small the physical quarters are. The current configuration results from a Depression-era renovation designed to increase the workspace of the president's staff without expanding the physical footprint of the building. Parts of the West Wing can feel grungy and old, and look as if they have been repainted far too often. Many of the offices contain mousetraps to fight the inevitable infestation. Because the windows don't open, for security reasons, large flies buzz near the ceilings. The relentless pressures and close quarters mean that someone in the West Wing always seems to be sick.

It may have arrived with little fanfare, but Russia's SWIFT alternative has, more or less, arrived. Speaking in no uncertain terms at a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin late last month, Elvira Nabiullina, the Governor of Russia's central bank, stated: "We have finished working on our own payment system, and if something happens, all operations in SWIFT format will work inside the country. We have created an alternative."

Now this news will be old news to intrepid Corbett Reporteers. My long-term audience will no doubt recall the September 21, 2014 episode of New World Next Week where James Evan Pilato and I covered the Russia/China talks to create both a SWIFT alternative and an independent ratings agency. You'll also of course recall my March 11, 2015 editorial in these very pages where I discussed then-recent reports that China was ready to go live with its own SWIFT alternative, the Cross-Border Inter-Bank Payments System. For those not following along at home, that system did indeed go live in October of that year, but in a "watered down" form that only accounts for cross-border yuan trade deals, not capital-related transactions.

But for those who are really lost in the woods, let's go back to my "China's SWIFT Alternative and the (Engineered) Death of the Dollar" editorial to re-establish just what SWIFT is and why alternatives to it are so potentially important. As I wrote at the time:

"For those who don't know, SWIFT stands for the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication and is shorthand for the SWIFTNet Network that is used by over 10,500 financial institutions in 215 countries and territories to transmit financial transaction data around the world. SWIFT does not do any of the clearing or processing for these transactions itself, but instead sends the payment orders that are then settled by correspondent banks of the member institutions. Still, given the system's near universality in the financial system, it means that virtually every international transaction between banking institutions goes through the SWIFT network."

This is why the SWIFT system is so important to the global economy and why it was a significant hamper to the Iranian economy when 30 Iranian financial institutions (including the central bank) were de-listed from the SWIFT network in 2012. And this is exactly why China and Russia have been so keen on setting up an alternative infrastructure of their own, just in case the "completely independent" SWIFT organization acts as a proxy weapon for the US State Department and its pals at some point in the future.

US missile strike increasingly looking like a pinprick as Syrian army continues to advance against Al-Qaeda and ISIS in Hama and Deir Ezzor.

The huge international attention devoted to the US missile strike on Syria's Al-Shayrat air base has drawn attention away from the continuing progress of the Syrian army in the war in Syria.

Bernie Sanders explains his opposition to Trump's Syria strike.

Former US Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders appeared on on CNN's "State of the Union" with Jake Tapper, to clarify his foreign policy stance, after a busy week of intervention from the Trump White House.

Senator Sanders was clear, stating that the US must not get involved in "perpetual warfare in the Middle East," explaining to CNN that the key to removing Syrian President Assad was to forgo unilateral action, and instead work to convince Russia and Iran to withdraw their support for the Syrian leader.

Turkey votes today in a referendum that could give President Tayyip Erdogan sweeping new powers in government, giving the President unprecedented control of the country.

Opinion polls give the "Yes" vote a narrow lead, but polls have been anything but reliable this past year.